As the Broadway rendition of “To Kill a Mockingbird” captivates America, criminal justice reform has never been more timely. We can celebrate how far we’ve come since the days of the fictional Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson, while still recognizing how much work remains to be done.
I recently saw the Broadway play, and it makes you reflect on America’s past — the racial injustices that shaped our history (and stubbornly persist today). Jeff Bridges, in his portrayal of Finch, looked right at me when he said, “You can’t understand someone else until you jump into their skin and walk around.” The entire audience felt the gravity of that moment.
I certainly felt it, although I’m as far removed from the backdrop of Maycomb County as anyone. I’m a 27-year-old who grew up in the blue-collar suburbs of Philadelphia.
But that doesn’t mean I cannot sympathize with those oppressed by the criminal justice system. My father served three years in prison for a non-violent drug possession. His life, as you can imagine, was changed forever by that sentence. After conviction, your social encounters, employment status, and very livelihood are never quite the same.
While my dad, now 30 years sober and a well-respected landscaping business owner in my community, has been able to restart his life, millions of Americans are still suffering at the hands of a criminal justice system built on excessive punishment — a broad brush that often lumps non-violent drug offenders with violent criminals. What is left is a booming prison-industrial complex and a nation of broken families.
Here are the facts: roughly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners are in American prisons and jails, even though we only hold 5 percent of the world’s population. Our prisons and jails are home to more than 2 million people — a 500 percent increase over the last 40 years. The U.S. incarceration rate — 670 per 100,000 people — is higher than those of Brazil, China, France Germany and India combined.
The War on Drugs shares the blame for the rise of America’s prison-industrial complex. Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people in prisons and jails for drug offenses — like my dad — skyrocketed from just under 41,000 to nearly 470,000.
Many landed in prison or jail because of a mandatory minimum sentence. These were first established in 1984, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. Mandatory minimums were then expanded under the Anti-Drug Abuse of Act of 1986, which set a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for offenses involving 100 grams of heroin, 500 grams of cocaine, or five grams of crack cocaine. Two years later, Congress added a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine, with no evidence of intent to sell.
Simply put, mandatory minimums are abhorrent, and especially harmful to minority communities. While African-Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, the imprisonment rate of African-Americans for drug charges is almost six times higher than that of whites. African-Americans represent 12.5 percent of illicit drug users, but 29 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 33 percent of those incarcerated in state facilities for drug offenses.
We’ve come a long way since the 1930s, but mandatory minimums should have no place in the land of the free. Why are law enforcement officers hunting down non-violent criminals in the hundreds of thousands? This is not to say that drug-related crimes should go unpunished, but we should make violent criminals the top priority. Murderers, rapists and burglars should feel the full force of the criminal justice system.
More than anything else, we need to rethink what it means to be incarcerated — and consider the life-altering impacts of a mandatory minimum. The First Step Act is, indeed, a step in the right direction. The new law, signed by President Trump last year, eases some of the most punitive prison sentences at the federal level and allows thousands of people to earn an earlier release from prison.
But criminal justice reform is by no means complete. Until mandatory minimums are left on the ash heap of history, the words of Atticus Finch will continue to ring painfully true.